A delegation of All Uttarakhand Parents’ Association (AUPA) met the Education Minister Arvind Pandey at his office in Vidhan Sabha on Tuesday and demanded that the State Government should implement the private school regulation authority act to rein in the private school operators.
The delegation was led by the President of AUPA, Neeraj Singhal. The memers of the AUPA raised the issue of open loot of the private schools and requested the minister that the pending private school regulatory authority should be tabled in the state assembly.
The delegation also submitted a memorandum to the minister. The President of the association, Neeraj Singhal said that the private schools increase fees every year in gross violation of norms. He said these schools have no Parent Teachers Associations (PTA) and in those they are, they are for name sake only.
The association has also claimed that the most of the private schools are also not following the norms of recommending only the books of National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) as mandated by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and are asking the students to purchase the books of private publishers which are costly and are inferior in quality than the books of NCERT. The AUPA further alleges that private school put pressure on the parents to deposit money every year in the name of building fees, Re admission fee, development fees, annual fees, Principal birthday fees, environment fees, Gymnasium charge and many other names which should be stopped.
The delegation told the minister that the previous Congress Government invited academicians, representatives of the schools and parents associations and prepared a comprehensive draft of the bill but under pressure of the private schools the government could not get the bill cleared from the assembly. The parents said that the parents are having very high expectations from the new BJP government and hope that the hegemony of private schools would be checked.